Running Windows 7 on the Mac

I have been running Windows XP on my Macbook Pro for some time, under Parallels, and was quite happy. I previously saw no good reason to upgrade from XP to Vista, since I was able to run Office 2007. But when Windows 7 came out, I felt that I was ready for the upgrade. Read on as I share my experiences.

I have been using Parallels 5, and have been very happy with the stability. They release periodic upgrades which seem to have made the system run faster.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium, and as usual the installation process under Parallels was very fast. I was literally up and running in minutes. Parallels gave me the choice of Windows XP and Windows 7. After I validated that Windows 7 was working ok, I removed XP. The only downside to this was that I had to install all the applications for Windows 7 (principally Microsoft Office 2007).

Everything worked well out of the box. However, I noticed the larger memory footprint of Windows 7 compared to XP once I opened up a big spreadsheet – everything started to slow down under Windows 7. While I could have resized the memory allocation under Parallels, I decided to upgrade my RAM to improve performance. I ordered 4 Gb (2 x 2 Gb), and removed the existing 2 Gb (2 x 1 Gb) that was factory installed.

Once that was finished, I allocated part of the memory to Windows 7. There was an immediate improvement. I would recommend having 4 Gb before running virtual machines, especially Windows 7. Performance is quite satisfactory. I believe that when running Excel macros, I would be getting similar performance to a dedicated Windows 7 machine.

Windows 7 is a massive improvement over past versions of Windows. It is still not as good as OS X, but it makes running Windows only applications less painful than in the past.

Running Excel 2007 under Windows 7 is a far better experience than Excel for Mac (this is very slow and does not support macros). The memory upgrade makes all the difference, although I still use OS X for most tasks. Running Windows 7 gives me access to any software that is not available for the Mac, and really is the best of both worlds.